Want to send mail over internet from home machine

[Giscardo]

What do I need to set up to be able to send email to other people? Using my ISP's SMTP is not an option. Is it possible to set up a server on my machine, that will allow me to send email out over the net?

I don' need to be able to receive email, and in fact would rather not be able to. I have SMTP service present in IIS, but I'm not sure how to use it. Not sure what my outgoing server name is etc.

Something free is better too. And I have a dynamic IP, but I don't need to be able to receive email so I don't know if that matters anyways.

 

[Slowlearner]

Get a webmail account Hotmail/yahoo/gmail etc.

Please explain what it is you are trying to do and why.

 

[Giscardo]

Working on software project. Whenever someone checks in code I have a service that builds the project, runs tests, archives files, etc, and I want it to send out emails to the team members. The config for the service is below, basically I want a server on my machine and to be able to fill in the ?????? in the below config.

<email from="giscard@?????????" mailhost="????????" includeDetails="TRUE">
<users>
<user name="giscard" group="developers" address="giscardo@myemailaddress.com"/>
.... (other team members)
</users>
<groups>
<group name="developers" notification="always"/>
</groups>
</email>

 

[Giscardo]

Anyone?

 

[cleverhandle]

I don't understand why you can't use your ISP's SMTP server. What's the problem with that?

 

[Giscardo]

I don't have the settings for my ISP, I'd rather just set it up on my machine.

 

[skyking]

usually, it is simply mail.yourprovider.com

test it out and use it, that is what it is for. They accept outgoing mail from within their domain without authentication in most cases.

 

[Nothinman]

Something free is better too. And I have a dynamic IP, but I don't need to be able to receive email so I don't know if that matters anyways.

It does matter (or at least might), a lot of domains will discard mail if it comes directly from a dynamic IP address, so even if you setup a SMTP daemon properly you might not be able to send mail to all of the people that you want.

 

[keyloans]

If outlook express is configured on your system .. them outgoing will automatically goes well

 

[Nothinman]

If outlook express is configured on your system .. them outgoing will automatically goes well

OE is not an MTA, it won't help him.

 

[RebateMonger]

Turn off your firewall, disable your antivirus, and surf a few sleazy web sites and click on stuff. You'll be sending mail over the Internet to lots of people in no time at all!

Seriously, as mentioned, many large ISPs block outgoing mail sent to external mailservers other than theirs. And many large mailservers block incoming mail sent from dynamic IP addresses. So your outgoing mail may not get very far.

 

[Giscardo]

Alright, I broke down and just called my ISP for the settings and my login. I'd set it up over a year ago and never used it, lost the paper where I wrote it all down on.

BTW, how do mailservers know if an email is coming from a dynamic IP?

 

[skyking]

reverse DNS.
The mail comes in and if they cannt do a reverse lookup of a domain name to your IP, your mail gets rejected. Only your ISP's DNS servers can provide a proper reverse lookup.

 

[Nothinman]

The mail comes in and if they cannt do a reverse lookup of a domain name to your IP, your mail gets rejected. Only your ISP's DNS servers can provide a proper reverse lookup.

I doubt they do that, unless you mean that they verify that the sender IP is an MX for the domain it pretends to be coming from and I even doubt they do that because DNS queries are expensive and given the time required to do the lookup times the thousands of messages they process an hour, their queues would most likely back up to unmanagable sizes.

 

[skyking]

doubt all you want. I had a few bigger domains reject my servers' mail until i got a proper in-addr-arpa record at the DNS server for my ISP.
It is by no means a unilateral thing, but I see it more often as spammers and legit providers duke it out.

 

[Nothinman]

doubt all you want. I had a few bigger domains reject my servers' mail until i got a proper in-addr-arpa record at the DNS server for my ISP.
It is by no means a unilateral thing, but I see it more often as spammers and legit providers duke it out.

I have no doubts that they check the IPs, but it would be much more likely that they check them against some sort of local database. Actually today I noticed that ssh was taking ~20s to connect to a local IP, I found out it was because the resolver was attempting to lookup the hostname in every domain in my search list and one of the domains is no longer functioning. Imagine the load on the mailserver that would place if every message could take up to 30s to process.

 

[skyking]

The last one that bounced my mail for a lack of reverse lookup was sprint <I think> I would guess they cache that stuff for mailservers to minimize the cost of lookup. It took a bit to get the qwest (my provider) tech to make the proper record, but it all worked fine after that.

 

[RebateMonger]

Typically, a check for a Reverse DNS record is NOT the same thing as a check for a dynamic IP address.

Cox, for instance, will accept email from a static IP address with no Reverse DNS record. But Cox will reject email from a dynamic IP address, and send a rejection notice stating the problem.

I've seen this recently with my clients:
One client changed IP addresses and didn't have a RDNS record. Cox was still accepting emal from their server.
Another client temporarily used a Qwest dynamic IP address before applying for a static IP. Cox refused to accept email from their server. As soon as they changed to a Qwest static IP, Cox started accepting mail.

 

[skyking]

My server's IP was static from the get-go, but quite possibly it was listed as from a dynamic pool.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: skyking
doubt all you want. I had a few bigger domains reject my servers' mail until i got a proper in-addr-arpa record at the DNS server for my ISP.
It is by no means a unilateral thing, but I see it more often as spammers and legit providers duke it out.

AOL DEFINITELY rejects email coming from an IP with no RDNS record. It's stated in their mail policies.

I recently had a client with a new static IP address, but a Reverse DNS record hadn't been established. AOL and a few other mailservers were rejecting all their email because of the lack of RDNS. Within a couple of hours of getting the RDNS established, AOL and the others started accepting the email.

 

[Eos]

We reject as well. All day long. We currently reject 800,000 messages every 24 hours. We have 8000 e-mail boxes...

I had a sys admins claim that "The Reverse DNS lookup does not need to match. It just needs to be there." Eh?

His system magically fixed itself the next day, as my cutomer started getting her mailing lists...